New technologies such as Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) have enabled ordinary households and small businesses to obtain broadband access to powerful computer networks, such as the Internet, over ordinary telephone company lines. The advent of new virtual-circuit protocols has made high speed voice and video communication over broadband networks efficient and practical. Virtual-Circuit protocols allow the definition of a specific data path through a network using an identifier known as a “virtual circuit.” While a datagram-based transport method such as an Internet Protocol (IP) packet is permitted to travel through a variety of network links, virtual-circuit packets are forced to travel over their designated virtual circuits. One popular virtual-circuit protocol is the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) protocol. The growing use of ATM has made the transmission of real-time movies and voice over large networks such as the Internet a reality. To enhance the consumer experience with ATM, the remote NETWORK DRIVER SPECIFICATION (NDIS) developed by MICROSOFT CORPORATION may include an ATM miniport which allows a personal computer to communicate with an ATM network. The remote NDIS is the subject of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/302,735 for a METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR ABSTRACTING NETWORK DEVICE DRIVERS, which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
With the increasing demand for access to virtual circuit networks, many households and businesses will experience internal competition for the limited number of broadband data lines, and will therefore have to institute a system of connection sharing in order to take advantage of the new virtual-circuit-based protocols. Additionally, more and more ordinary devices, such as televisions and radios, are being adapted to use networks such as the Internet, thereby increasing the competition for the use of these data lines. Thus, it can be seen that there is a need for an improved method and system for communicating with a virtual-circuit network.